Republic now hosts an ' interview with Gordon Bell , whose story I think of great interest not only for the right of new technologies.

Gordon Bell does not need to remember, but has no chance of forgetting. Gordon Bell is a character in a novel or a movie or a sci-fi novel "Pico della Mirandola." Mr. Bell is 75 years old and, like all of us forget things accidentally. Unlike us, however, is a researcher at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco and nearly ten years ago the guinea pig for his research project as indicative: MyLifeBits . Since 2001, Gordon, thanks to new technologies, it records all his life in a huge database (repository), realizing a real "copy" digital. Always carries a tiny camera that snaps a picture every minute and wears some sensors that can see and save the changes of light (eg. If you enter a coffee) or temperature.

(Gordon Bell in a photo of Aquillo )

But that's not all conversations and telephone calls are recorded by Gordon and all his movements are tracked using a GPS device. After almost ten years of the project, the digital memory of Mr. Bell is composed of thousands of videos, audio files, digital photos, e-mail and Web pages, all that Gordon has done, seen or read was transformed into bits and ended up in a giant digital archive to which access can rebuild in a few seconds and with pinpoint accuracy every detail.
Not long ago Mr. Bell also collects and stores data relating to his health, the heart beats and calories, this means that Gordon, unlike many of his peers, does not have to worry about loss of memory that carries the old age.
The results of this project are so valuable that have already begun the therapeutic applications and the same technologies are being used on a limited number of people suffering from neuro-degenerative diseases. In these cases the benefits are undeniable, and they help their patients live their lives with less anxiety in the disease.
From the technical point of view the main problem appears only one: how much space is required to digitally store a lifetime? Fortunately, this is an area too large to assume the immediate dissemination of this "digital archiving" of our lives. But in a few years technology will obviate this obstacle and would therefore be desirable to consider from now on the risks of widespread use of these applications: if the therapeutic value is undoubted, the implications of a generalization are least disturbing.

First, the most serious risk is that this technology could induce individuals to behave differently, regardless of privacy issues (of which Bell himself seems aware ) and proprietary digital memory (what happens at death with all the information stored?), if everything is recorded and can be carefully examined probably people will behave differently and we will have a world of conformist.

And then, the general opinion is that many things it is better to forget: in the words of Khalil Gibran , also "Forgetfulness is a form of freedom."